Research

Call for Participants!

The HOPE Plus Project: We Need Your Help!

Unlike educational opportunity and economic prosperity, giftedness is truly color blind. It exists in all populations regardless of race, gender, or cultural background. One of the most underservedpopulations among gifted and talented individuals across the country are Native American students. In recognition of this fact, Purdue's Gifted Education Resource Institute (GERI) has undertaken a major project in partnership with the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation to help address thecurrent situation and we need your help! The program can be completely described by its title, HOPE+, which stands for "Having Opportunities Promotes Excellence".

The project has two phases. Phase one involves bringing 62 Native American students in grades 6 through 12 from the Navajo, Ojibwe, and Lakota tribes to Purdue to participate in the GERI Summer Residential gifted enrichment program. The second phase of the project is where you come in! It is my responsibility as a PhD student in gifted education at Purdue University to validate the HOPE Nomination Scale (Gentry, Peters, & Peterson, 2008) for use with Native American students. The HOPE Scale is a teacher rating instrument that measures academic and social aspects of giftedness. I have already collected 1,300 completed HOPE Scales from teachers of Native American students. Now, I need to collect just as many completed HOPE Scales from teachers of non-native students.

If you are a teacher or administrator from a school that teaches 6th through 12th grade students from the general population or mixed-ability and would be willing to help by completing a short 12 question scale on each of your students, please contact Jason McIntosh atmcintoj@purdue.edu. It typically takes 2 or 3 minutes to complete the scale for one student. The deadline for completing the scales is March 15th. You can help make a difference in the lives of Native American students across the country. Please contact me with any questions or concerns you may have.